


so we may see

by endquestionmark



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5418821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For all my faults — many, no doubt, if the breadth of my father’s criticism was anything to go by — I would not call myself unobservant in matters of human nature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so we may see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [freloux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freloux/gifts).



> As requested: a canon-compliant bacchanal, with no violence or kink, in negative space. Title from Sappho.

For all my faults — many, no doubt, if the breadth of my father’s criticism was anything to go by — I would not call myself unobservant in matters of human nature. Like my father, I tend to favor breadth over depth; despite my best efforts, I seem to be the prodigal when it comes to inherited sins, but perhaps my efforts to understand his superficiality have led to an unconscious emulation of the same. All too often, that first endless autumn, and every one since, I have found my peers worthy of perfunctory interest at best. Gaultier, Parliaments, paperbacks better suited to remedying various eccentricities of furniture than those of the mind and, perhaps, responsible for exacerbating them more than anything else. Left to acquire inertia, and to yellow with age, I find that it is only the expression of such ordinariness that changes, rather than its nature. Gaultier becomes whatever cut of suit is touted by those who should know, capital letter explicit rather than implied; Parliaments are transmuted to young wine, in great quantities; cheap paperbacks, it seems, are the one constant. In waiting rooms, and in boxes of secondhand books, and at newsstands in train stations, I find them still, and am instantly transported back to the last-minute frenzy of Hampden in November, the early chill doing nothing to diminish the imminence of the holidays.

Papers, and exams, and the sudden reality of deadlines no longer dismissible as a worry for tomorrow: it was like watching, from a great distance, the activity of some sort of _Hymenoptera_ colony — ants, all, and I the lone scarab among them. Viewed as if through the wrong end of a telescope, theirs were undeniably the most mundane of concerns, but unavoidable nevertheless, and particularly so at the end of term, when months of procrastination manifested in the most pervasive of ways. A proliferation of labels in the kitchen, and odd bursts of activity: pacing in the kitchen, feet pounding up the stairs at unpredictable intervals, all indicative of a certain cheerful sort of fatalism, omnipresent from the basement to the battlements.

Weekends at Francis’s, then, were the best sort of respite: stolen fruit, and all the sweeter for it. I brought my reading, and got very little of it done, if any; from what I could tell, the others did the same, and achieved a comparable amount. Henry, of course, did not have to worry. Of all of us, he was the closest to having achieved the same state of mind as the ancients, as far as I could see, a certain steadfastness that brought to mind some endless marble edifice, adamant and abiding. It had not yet snowed, but the stillness of the air spoke of its imminence, and even Henry had conceded defeat in the face of the implacable cold seeping down from the mountains. We dragged the boat up from the lake, or rather Charles and I did, while Henry — unsurpassed in strategy, but less so in such prosaic matters of maneuvering — offered no advice but rather stood by in his robe and slippers as we heaved it a yard at a time up the lawn. Francis, rather less helpfully, offered advice regarding the approach to the shed, and crunched after us, barefoot despite the frost, as Charles heaved at the lines and I threw my weight behind the stern.

Bunny’s presence, I must admit, has since escaped me, but then we do so many kindnesses in retrospect which I am not inclined to allow him in the first place. He was most likely installed on the porch, as he always was, in the most ostentatious of the comfortable chairs, leaving Camilla to the swing, with a mug of chocolate and a look of utmost gratification. Francis, I noticed, had taken to avoiding him when possible; this amounted, now that we were housebound, to a certain lapinesque tendency to freeze at sudden movements, or some minute change in air quality imperceptible to anybody else. Camilla, hoarser than usual from her bout of laryngitis, was nursing a mug of tea when we finally slammed the door on the rowboat — “I wish we’d burned it,” Charles said, brushing his hands clean, “and given it the farewell it deserves” — and I had laughed, shaking the feeling back into my fingers, charmed despite myself by the childishness of the sentiment. We trooped back to the house, flushed from exertion despite the lingering morning chill.

“Oh, Charles,” Camilla said, a certain Romantic accent to the affricate, a lushness to her articulation. She set her tea aside, and even winded as I was, I could taste the Scotch in it on the clear cold breeze. It smelled like the inherent starkness of a signal fire, a harsh light on a cliff far over the sea. Lapsang, and Scotch, and perhaps lemon: next to the shapeless drape of a blanket over Camilla’s shoulders, and the lucent quality that she acquired in the cold, an alabaster blush, I could not help but think of her as a marble in repose, caught unawares as the lights of the gallery come on one at a time. “Not again,” she said, and Charles went to stand before her; Henry, as was his tendency, had disappeared, presumably in search of of reading now that the morning’s entertainment was finished. “You’ll be a sideshow pincushion if you keep this up.” Camilla took his hand by the wrist, and turned it so that she could pull the fibers from his palm. Head bent to her task, she was enchanting; when Camilla focused her attention so intensely, be it on one of Bunny’s essays — inevitably illegible, even before one tried to make sense of the contents — or Henry’s pocket lexicon, which I suspected he carried more as an explanatory aid than a reference, she seemed to lapidify. I found it unspeakably charming.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Charles said, rather more brusquely than I thought was warranted, and pulled his hand back. “Honestly, Camilla, I don’t know why I missed your voice.” He closed his injured hand, and held it almost proprietarily to his chest with the other, pride inexplicably as wounded as his flesh, if not more so.

“Really,” Francis said, and went curiously still when Charles rounded on him, though his immobility only lasted for a moment. “Don’t fight. I don’t think I could take it, not so soon after — I mean — not so close to the end of term,” he said, and glanced at me. He knew, I supposed, that I had no particular plans; I did appreciate that he wished, perhaps, to leave me an unblemished recollection over the holidays, and none of the usual small conflicts to magnify through boredom and inactivity until spring term, and a return to our particular variety of normalcy. “She’s just trying to help, aren’t you, Camilla?”

“I need a drink,” Charles said, and the look that he cast at Camilla was almost wary, before he turned on his heel and let the screen door slam after him. A moment later, we heard the clinking of glasses, and the racket that Charles inevitably made whenever he was looking for something in particular, and not merely relying on the luck of the draw from the bottles in the sideboard.

Camilla, for her part, returned to her tea. The blanket slipped from her shoulder, but she made no move to pull it close, and for a moment I found the wing of her collarbone shocking in its lifelikeness, like the bloom of a blush across marble, and was unable to look away. When I did, finally, she was considering me, eyes caught somewhere between animation and anathema, and I could not help but think of the baying of hunting hounds, and mysteries not meant to be profaned by mortal eyes.

When Camilla looked away, out across the lawn and the lake and into the mist burning off further down the valley, I wanted — more than anything — to hunt her, and prove myself worthy of that profanation.

“Told you,” Bunny said, and his hand landed heavily on my shoulder. I hated him, then, in the way that we all did from time to time, with the brightness of an errant spark, and just as easily brushed off. “Women with ideas, eh? Find yourself someone solid, that’s the idea. None of this trouble with a girl who knows what’s what.”

He had me. There was no escape. I sat, and listened to his discourse about what women really want — “A solid chap, none of these modern sorts, don’t know what they’re about” — and Camilla, at the other end of the porch, accrued silence until I wished that it would suffocate all of us.

Finally, Charles returned with a mug full of God only knows what — judging by the faces that he made when he tasted it, I was thankful for its opacity, and my lack of proximity — and sat beside Camilla on the swing. She did not look at him, nor did she make room, but he set the mug down between their feet, and offered his open hand, palm almost convex in oblation. I could not quite make out what he said, as they sat with their heads bent together, beyond the occasional sibilant; an apology, I thought, or perhaps a litany of some sort. Petition and supplication, and no pattern of language that I recognized, limited though my repertoire was. A _folie à deux_ , if the two were one, or an idioglossia of touch: Camilla’s fingertips on his palm, and the precise pinch of her nails; the slight flexion of Charles’s fingers, as she worked.

Only half-listening to Bunny — once he had gotten started, I had found, there was no need to listen, but only to agree at convenient intervals until he ran out of steam — I watched as Charles brushed his fingers down the line of Camilla’s throat, with his free hand, and paused, fingertips at the very edge of the blanket.

As he drew it down her shoulder — not impersonally, but with a sort of care that was very difficult to watch, and yet impossible to look away from — I realized that I was holding my breath and waiting. For what, I do not know: to be struck down, perhaps, or torn apart for my audacity, or caught in the act of a sort of aesthetic theft, and cast out. “There,” Charles said, barely audible, and brushed his fingertips over the very apex of her shoulder, the point of the arch.

The way that Camilla looked at him, lifting her head for the first time in ten minutes, was both tolerant and threatening.

I looked away just in time for Bunny to spread his hands, munificent and magnanimous. “We know what’s up, don’t we?” he said, and it seemed to me that there was an uncommon perceptiveness in the way that he was looking at me.

“We do,” I said, and looked out over the valley, hazy now with the last of the mist. “We do indeed.”

“Good chap,” Bunny said, and when I turned back, he was looking at Charles and Camilla, fingers tight on the arm of his chair. “I knew I could count on you to get it.”

 

* * *

 

The relentless activity at Hampden, somehow, never managed to permeate through to Julian’s lectures. I got the sense that he regarded the majority of the student body as amusing at best, and inconsequential at middling, rather as a parent regards a child who lifts a slate to watch ants scuttling for shelter; he was two steps removed, and preferred to watch the proceedings from a frankly vertiginous height. While I must confess a certain amusement at the unrest that resulted from finals, and papers, and a general self-inflicted insomnia, it was nevertheless pleasant to have the weekends to spend as I wished. Rather than lingering on the porch with Bunny, I wandered down to the edge of the lake, and followed the shore for a ways, allowing the gentle ebb and flow of the water to soothe me into a sort of half-waking state. Putting one foot in front of the other, and listening to the starlings in the trees — a great flock had descended the night before, when we had driven up, and I had woken to their raucous chatter — I found that I had gone farther than I had intended, and would no doubt be missed. Turning back, the house was tiny, and barely visible through the trees, a copse of white birch that leant the entire thing a sort of austerity, a certain Ionic simplicity in negative. As I walked, the distance seemed to extend, an endless expanse that became more colorless by the minute, and by the time that I reached the steps, I thought that I would fade away with it.

Inside, the house was quiet. Had the others gone into town? I thought that I had seen Henry’s car in the drive, but perhaps not. Bunny was conspicuous by his absence, or at least his silence; if Francis was notable for his jumpiness, he had gone somewhere else to be startled. I wanted a hot drink, and to smoke out the window, and to feel slightly more present and less jarred out of place, as I had at the beginning of term, but in reverse. When before I had felt suddenly alive, aware of the incandescence of the autumn and the enchantment inherent to everything around me — _a god in every tree_ , Julian had said, and looking at the blaze of the fall foliage, I had been all too inclined to believe him — I felt, now, as if I was moving through the underworld, all asphodel and ash. Halfway down the hallway, I realized that I had left my cigarettes upstairs, and pulled one of Henry’s from a pack abandoned in a bowl of fruit rather than going back for my own.

Why I paused outside the kitchen, I will never know. Call it, if you like, instinct, or some sort of premonition; I have never fancied myself particularly sensitive, at least in any way worth remarking upon, but I have always had a sort of awareness for when my presence is wanted, and when it is not. Then, it struck me as a sudden slowness to the moment, as of somebody who is a spectator to their own movements, and I stopped just outside the door.

Inside, Camilla was sitting on the counter, bare legs dangling over the edge — colt-like and lovely, and I thought of Henry carrying her up from the lake, and the rich redness of her blood, and the long line of her throat — and Henry, standing beside her, was reading to her. What the book was, I do not know; what he was reading, I do not know either, as my Greek was insufficient then and my curiosity insufficient now to attempt a reconstruction. His glasses were slipping down his nose, and he was dressed in his habitual formal black, though his jacket was nowhere to be seen, and his shirtsleeves were pushed up. I considered his hands — strong — and his forearms — surprisingly so — and only remembered after a moment to make sure that I was unseen. On that front, I had no cause for worry. The door was only half-open, and all that I could see of Camilla was the arch of one foot, and the vague tousle of her hair, or perhaps the way that the light shone through it, all honey and wheat.

Of Henry, on the other hand, I could see more than I was used to. Habitually hermetical, and dressed for the part in structural layers that I could not decipher beyond line and liking, it was shocking to see him so casually attired, and so at ease. Even speaking as he was, in a language with audible angles, there was an intimacy to the moment that made me instantly wish that I had not interrupted it with my observation, cementing it as certain rather than ephemeral. He looked the most mortal that I had ever seen him, and I was going to find somewhere else to smoke — the porch, perhaps, or my room, or the solar in the back of the house that looked out over a scant ten feet of lawn, and then the imminence of the forest — when he paused in his reading, and for a moment I was terrified that he had seen me.

He hadn’t, of course; had he seen me, I have no doubt that Henry would have handled it with his usual aplomb. Looking up from his hands again, it took me a moment to understand, and then I saw Camilla’s hand — her fingers in his dark hair, at the back of his head, like quartz veins in basalt — and knew, immediately, that I should go. I should, of course, have gone a long time previously. Whether it was Camilla’s stark loveliness that kept me, or something in Henry’s manner — he turned to look at her, then, though his eyes were closed, and I could think of nothing so much as a great hound, some untamed creature at heel nevertheless — I had outstayed my welcome, a sensation which had become familiar over a week of strangenesses. First, Camilla’s uncharacteristic silence, and the red slash of her scarf at her throat, and then Francis’s nerviness, unfamiliar when taken to such extremes, and Charles’s puerile pettiness: the only ones who had not changed were Henry, though looking at him now I had to wonder, and Bunny, who of all of them could have used it most.

Henry’s hand, I realized, was on Camilla’s thigh, and his grip was tight enough that I could see the shadows where his fingertips left indentations in her skin, and she turned away from his touch, and considered him obliquely, over the same shoulder that Charles had traced so jealously. The span of his hand, and the width of his shoulders, and her foot, pointed like a dancer’s: I could not look away, but even now, I can see it as if worked in marble; I will be able to see it, I think, for the rest of my life.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Charles said, and I jumped. He had come up behind me suddenly, or perhaps I had simply been so absorbed that I had not noticed his approach.

I realized, very suddenly, that I did not want him to see what I had seen. Partly it was selfishness, of course; I wanted the fact of it — Henry’s hands, Camilla’s fingers in his hair — for myself alone. Partly it was the knowledge that he would be furious, in that unknowable way of his, until he and Camilla had fought about it — bitterly, for weeks — and made the rest of us miserable in the process. “Lost my lighter,” I said, instead. “Have you got one?”

“I think it’s on the porch,” Charles said. “Any chance of lunch, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t either, not with Bunny in the house.” He pushed up his sleeve, and then caught himself and crossed his arms, rubbing at his arm over his shirt, instead, just above the elbow. With his shoulders hunched up, he looked petulant, and I thought it best, whatever he was about to say, to head it off at the pass instead.

“Henry’s left his cigarettes,” I said. “If you still want me to look over your paper, we can do that on the porch, and if you don’t like it, we can burn it in the library.” Charles cheered up immediately, as I knew he would. Petty destruction and the possibility of getting away with something always put him in a better mood, but his face fell.

“Christ,” he said. “Do you think my mug is still out there?”

“I haven’t touched it,” I said, completely honestly. I hadn’t even wanted to go within ten feet of the thing.

“Me neither,” he said, mournfully. “We can use it as kerosene, if my paper won’t light.”

Thankful, at last, for the escape, I followed him down the hallway — endless shelves and silver, and the sideboard waiting to trip us in the half-light — and out onto the porch, and blessed air.

 

* * *

 

On the porch, we found Francis, smoking like a chimney and consuming the newspaper at an approximately equivalent rate. Charles surreptitiously nudged his mug off the edge of the porch, and settled into the porch swing; I offered him the pack of Lucky Strikes, and leaned against the railing. I had always considered myself at best advantage when standing, and so I smoked with one hand in my pocket and the other propped up at the elbow, and only remembered after a moment that Francis was present. “Smoke?” I said, and he flung the newspaper down.

“I suppose,” he said, irritably, and took one as if it had personally offended him.

“Don’t be like that,” said Charles, all boyish charm with a cigarette in his hand and his hair tousled from pulling his sweater on. His cuffs, undone and shoved up to his elbows, loaned him a certain academic air, but his crooked smile was all mischief. “Let me light you.” Francis leaned in, but instead of pulling his lighter from his pocket, Charles mirrored him, and pressed the tip of his lit cigarette to Francis’s, and took a deep drag that even I could see in the shift of his shoulders and the pull of his jaw.

“Thanks,” Francis said, still peeved, but there was a certain concession to his tone, and Charles smiled, genuinely this time.

“The least I can do for a friend,” he said, and Francis went still, as if struck.

“Of course,” he said, and turned away, crossing his legs the way that Camilla did when she was angry. “Richard would do the same, wouldn’t he.”

“I haven’t a lighter,” I said, confused.

“Oh, don’t fight,” Charles said. “Not when we’re all getting on so well.”

“Must you always,” Francis said, and looked as if he immediately regretted it, “be so poisonous, Charles?”

“I can’t help it,” Charles said, and leaned back, bringing his cigarette to his lips. “You let me take such liberties. I’m too used to it.”

“We do,” Francis said, blowing out smoke, and rubbing with his thumb at the corner of his lips. Charles, I thought, was watching him; I knew that I was. Francis, usually so economic of movement, if excessive of limb, and his mouth bitten pink in the cold: it was a novelty to see him so distracted yet contained, if such a thing can make sense. Looking back, it was an aesthetic fascination of mine, to see even such a simple, unconscious movement imbued with his tendency to fidgety gentility. It certainly wasn’t the avidity with which Charles considered him, I suspect, though of course hindsight lends such things a rather different light.

“Well,” Charles said, “I certainly hope you won’t stop now,” and the little-boy earnestness of his voice and the way that he was no doubt looking at Francis — I can see it now, even so, the solemnity of his tone and a certain clarity of expression: nobody could say no to Charles, not when he asked like that — were evident even from my disadvantaged perspective.

“No,” Francis said, and for a moment I thought that he had managed it, but then he went on. “No, I suppose I can’t, can I.”

Charles shrugged, and Francis leaned towards him, like a candle flame before an open window, and Charles pushed himself to his feet, to lean against the railing next to me; Francis faltered, and turned away, and looked down the length of the porch.

“What was that about?” I asked Charles, under my breath.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, and shrugged, rubbing at his arm again. “To the mountain and all that — winter, end of term, that sort of thing — we’re all a bit out of sorts.” He paused. “Where’s Bunny?”

“Probably making airplanes out of deeds and throwing them out the attic window,” I said.

Charles laughed, and then caught himself, and paused, looking at me oddly. “You know,” he said, “this is a bit of an odd question, but I think you’d know. Have you ever—” he gestured, with his cigarette, and paused again. “—I suppose,” Charles said, finally, “have you ever done something where you wake up the next morning, and it finally makes sense? All of it,” he said, and his eyes were alight, and he looked like a bowsprit, Nike in flight to match Venus in repose. “Like some great story, all of it falling into place.”

“Yes,” I said, looking at him — the openness of hope in his expression, and the unknowable lucidity in his eyes, and the fictive quality that I had grasped from the moment that I first saw Henry, a matter of certainty rather than conscious thought — “Yes, I think I have.”

“Was it worth it?” Charles said.

“Every second,” I said, without hesitation.

“Yes,” he said. “I think so too.”

When his cigarette went out, he lit another, and so did I; we leaned against the railing, and watched the afternoon wane, as if overlaid by parchment paper, and smoked in silence, and began to see.


End file.
